Monday, May 27, 2013

Two excellent articles on e-commerce by Andy Dunn, Co-Founder and CEO of Bonobos.

E-Commerce is a Bear. My take away from this article is the importance of brand building for a "Proprietary Merchandise" company. Shoes of Prey also falls into Andy's "Proprietary Experience" category but because what is being built is new, I think brand is important there too. We've been discussing internally the balance between ROI, transactional focused marketing and brand marketing and this is a good reminder that both are important.

Start-Up Drugs. My first take away from this article is to be wary of advertising channels that grow top line revenue but negatively impact the bottom line. It's hard but very important to do the analysis to understand the bottom line impact, and not fall into the trap of good news bias. We have a fantastic marketing team and I think we're doing a good job here as we start to find channels that are scaling our business, we should ensure we continue to focus hard on this.

My second take away is that the very skills that make an early stage founder successful - imagination coupled with the charisma and ability to drive that imagination into reality by inspiring a team and raising capital, can be the very skills that derail a larger, growing startup. A fascination with shiny new things, and the ability to inspire and direct a team to work on them can be disastrous for a growing startup that instead needs focus and a leader who can prioritise and say no. I definitely have some learning to do here.